Spend time on the road with God

If I’d had a say on what Amarillo should do about drivers texting and talking on cellphones, I probably would have voted against texting but would have allowed talking.

But with enforcement of the ban approaching, my wife came up with a pretty good alternative to holding the phone to your ear. She bought each of us a wireless speaker attached to the car’s visor that allows you to punch one button to answer a call, then speak with both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road.

Some people are so accustomed to using the phone in their cars for business or personal reasons that they will have to keep it up, so I’m sure sales will soar locally for such devices.

Here’s another option: Use your driving time to talk to someone who doesn’t need a phone.

That would be God.

Many of us have been taught that a regular time with the Creator each day is crucial to living life as we should, to treating others well and to having our own peace of mind. Making time for that “quiet time” usually is the problem.

How about spending five minutes of the drive to work each morning consciously talking to God? Most people refer to that activity as praying.

If you have read this column for a while, you know that I wrote about doing my main daily praying in the shower. That’s another time period that, other than making you clean, would be wasted. (I did get some funny looks from people after I wrote about that habit.)

Sometimes I also pray in the car. That necessitates turning off the radio (sorry, KGNC-AM and the Eagle), but when driving alone, an automobile is a good place to meet God for a few minutes.

Maybe the cellphone ban will be a good incentive for people to look up while watching the road.

A C.S. Lewis College update: After the big September announcement that Hobby Lobby was awarding the Northfield, Mass., campus that it owns to Grand Canyon University, the Phoenix-based GCU turned down the offer in October.

C.S. Lewis College, still in the planning stages, had been the first recipient of the free campus but was not able to raise the funds required to show that it could handle the gift.

According to the Greenfield (Mass.) Recorder, GCU had planned to spend $150 million to upgrade the campus to serve 5,000 students but ran into another $30 million in infrastructure costs the town of Northfield was not willing to share. After the Arizona school announced it was moving in, some residents and businesses in the 3,000-population town started having second thoughts on how the large university would change things.

Town leaders accused the Green family, which owns Hobby Lobby, of not communicating with them well enough. Hobby Lobby representative Jerry Pattengale told Christianity Today magazine, “While most communities nationwide are offering amazing abatements and have teams that roll out the red carpets for new businesses ... many in Northfield basically shut doors or tried to.”

Now Hobby Lobby is looking for a school to occupy the campus, and C.S. Lewis College officials say it isn’t out of the question that they could be in the mix again. CSL Foundation President Stan Mattson wrote on Oct. 30, “For the present, it appears a glimmer of light may have returned to the Northfield option.”